It happens every year. Sometimes more than once.

A holiday or other special occasion is coming up, and I know there are related things I want to do, but my mind freezes with option paralysis and timidity and I can’t think of or do any of those things and so the event will come and pass, and then the spell will finally be broken and I’ll be able to think again, and only THEN will I suddenly think of all the things I “should” have done and start beating myself up over it.

Well I am goddamned sick of it so I am going to take a hammer and chisel to that god damned ice in my mind and in my soul and smash it into nothing but snow, which quickly melts in the sun.

So I am doing my best to imagine that it’s Boxing Day and Christmas is completely over for another year and I have the Boxing Day blues and I am kicking myself for missing the opportunity to…. do what?

Nope. Still drawing a blank.

Almost everything I can think of isn’t an activity, it’s a sentiment. All I really want for Christmas is my family. My Mom is in her Seventies, so we can never be sure how many Xmases she has left in here. And every time I think about that, I get so homesick it makes me heartsick. I want to see her again so bad it aches my soul.

Please don’t leave without me, Mom. Wait for me to catch up.

And of course I want to see my siblings too. I miss the hell out of them. I’ve come to feel like a lonely satellite way over here on the Wet Coast, far away from even the side of the continent I hail from, and I miss Anne, Catherine, and David so bad.

Here I am, staying out of the way again. Isolating myself from all the love and warmth and togetherness that I want so badly but can’t get close enough to feel for fear that the heat would melt my snowflake heart.

Like that would be so bad. I’d rather be a puddle than an icicle. I’d rather melt than die of emotional malnutrition. I would rather evaporate like a puddle in July than spend another winter frozen in place like a snowman.

Besides, none of that ice and frost and snow is really me anyhow. It’s just the byproduct of an overzealous fire suppressing system, and reflects nothing about myself and who I truly am as a person.

I could fly my little spaceship right up to the sun and let its rays melt the frost from my crest like it melted the wings off of Icarus and absolutely nothing of value would be lost.

I might not recognize the scared little animal that washes up on the shore once the floos waters have receded, but I will know for god damn certain he’s mine.

‘Cause he’s me.

More after the break.

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My new wheels

Check out my totally cherry new wheels, bro!

It’s one of these and it’s my Xmas gift from Joe. And I was looking forward to a walker that wasn’t missing a wheel and that I therefore have to push pretty hard in order to get it to painfully scrape forward.

But it turns out there is quite the learning curve.

Because the second I tried the new one, the front end started veering all over the place and I nearly fell over.

As it turns out, going from a walker which requires extra oomph to get it to go anywhere to one with silky smooth action is a pretty big leap and I was pushing too hard.

I soon adapted. Pushed gently, let the walker tell me how much force I needed.

But sadly, there is a more profound issue : it’s not tall enough.

Even at maximum extension, I have to hunch over to use it. And not just a tiny bit. When I got back from Denny’s just now, for a moment or two after I let go of the handles and even then it took real effort to straighten up at all.

That is simply unacceptable. My old crappy one-wheeled walker was better than that. I can’t go around hunched over like that. It would wreck my back.

So now I have to summon all my assertiveness and go tell Joe that his gift to me is not working out and he has to return it.

This will be very hard for me. I hate having to disappoint people or give them bad news, even if I am not to blame for any of it.

Part and parcel of my being such a sensitive soul, I suppose.

But as is, I can’t use that thing. So I am going to ask Joe if he is sure he can’t get anyh more height out of the thing,. And if he can’t, it has to go.

Luckily, I warmed up my assertiveness muscles earlier at Denny’s. I ordered the pot roast dinner and when it arrived I took a bite and noticed a distinct and very out of context alcohol taste to the pot roast.

I tried another bite. Same thing.

So I told the manager about it. That was the assertiveness bit. Luckily, I had told my friends about it first, so I knew I had their backing, and that helped a lot.

He apologized. I asked for another order of the same thing. They were out of it., So I ordered my old reliable order : chicken strips dinner with corn and mashed potatoes.

What can I say, I’m a meat and potatoes kind of guy.

They were fine.

But there was something just as wrong with Felicity’s turkey dinner, too.

I am thinking there was some fault in the freezer. Someone left the door open, perhaps, or there had been a power interruption, or the like.

Now for the time being, I consider the matter closed. We love that Denny’s and they love us, and we have never had a problem like this before.

But if I get sick from this, I am going to have to escalate.

I’m not saying lawsuit, but I am saying financial compensation will be sought. And I am guessing granted, because the last thing the chain wants is the word “Denny’s” in the same headline as, “vomit” or “made him sick”.

The real problem though is that I have a very strong aversion to food that might be rotten after getting extreme food poisoning from some food from a 7-11 back in ’88.

And that aversion has been activated and these kinds of things are very strong because they are meant to keep you from eating poison.

The normal course of action for this kind of incident would be to form a powerful and unstoppable disgust for Denny’s,

But I don’t want to lose Denny’s. Like I said, we love them and they love us. I don’t want this one incident to ruin that,

So now I am actively grappling with the aversion part of my brain to keep it from forming that iron clad disgust so we can keep going there.

My life is a bizarre adventure sometimes.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.